Suppose you desperately needed to lose weight but had a Big Mac with fries and a Coke staring you in the face. You could take your need to diet seriously and say, “No thanks, I’ll have a salad.” Or you could decide to reduce the Big Mac meal by 2 percent—pushing aside a couple French fries and gobbling up the rest.
If you took Option B, how do you think that “diet” would work out for you? Well, that, my friends, is the tale of the sequester that hit us this morning.
For the past few days the White House, with a big assist from sympathetic media, has done all within its considerable powers to make it seem like sequestration means the end of the world. If all you’ve heard is their side, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Mayans were right after all—just off by a couple of months on their prediction of the apocalypse.
This political panic needs a little common sense. In the last decade, federal spending has exploded from a $2 trillion budget in 2002 to a $3.5 trillion budget in 2012—a 75 percent increase. Over the next 10 years, the budget is projected to grow another 69 percent to $6 trillion. The sequester barely taps the brakes on this runaway spending, still allowing a 67 percent increase over the next 10 years. Too much to ask of Washington?
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